Emile Bernard, Confirmand's Procession, 1891

Bernard spent extensive time in the French province of Brittany, a rural region he believed exemplified a traditional, religious way of life. Ignoring the effects of industrialization, he produced images such as this painting, which depicts a group of young Breton girls participating in the Catholic sacrament of confirmation.

By representing space through overlapping flat planes, using heavy outlines, and choosing unnatural colors, Bernard intended to recapture a medieval, Catholic sacred ideal. Yet in his attempt to retrieve an idealized past, he created a very modern style that came to be called Synthetism, or Symbolism. In 1891, the year he painted Confirmand’s Procession, he wrote, “I would dream of creating a hieratic style looking beyond modernity and present day reality for its methods and inspiration. I needed to go back to the Primitives: adopt a very abbreviated technique, use line solely in order to determine form and color… In other words, what I wanted to do was create a style for our age.